Turmoil in the world of Islam

In more than fourteen centuries of Islam there hasn’t been a more precarious moment. Poised at one end are beliefs that only mean peace while on the other are its practitioners who are the principal protagonists in global strife and civilisational disharmony.

From Paris to Brussels, to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, havoc is wreaked in Islam’s name. A sad commentary on the state of the religion whose Prophet (pbuh) only advised patience in the face of extreme adversity and difficulties. What in the world are we doing to the name of Islam?

Brussels and Paris and London host some millions of Muslims who have found refuge there from the travesties of the economic and social injustice in their native lands. The countries where these cities belong have offered succour for ages to those who either felt persecuted or sought opportunity. As the flames of war alight in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, thousands and thousands throng to seek refuge there even as we speak, but are thwarted by the consequences of those who have now become a convenient weapon of war against their host communities. Before them their forebears from the Muslim Maghreb had been welcomed, yet their progeny finds infused dissonance with their host culture and react around misplaced and romantic interpretations turning against their benefactors.

As a consequence, those who wish to seek life and escape death will be denied their chance because of the perpetration of the gory death and devastation that their fellow Muslims have enacted in their intended destinations. If Europe were to reverse its policies of accepting these refugees, they will have only their fellow faith-men to blame. Especially when few Muslim nations have as much as offered to house the displaced and the dispossessed from the unfortunate lands of war. The competing narrative that these self appointed guardians of the faith employ is exactly the distortion of the narrative of the war and built around the West targeting Islam in debilitating wars. And they are seemingly successful in selling it to an idealistic Muslim youth continents away.

The advent of Isis and the continuing wars are an attractive recall to the following generations of the Muslim immigrants of Europe who return to their native lands in romantic images of what they still hope can be reclaimed. Instead their impressionable minds are twined in civilisational narratives that perpetuate wars in the interest of those whose self-serving interest is to sustain these war economies all across the Muslim world which helps them retain their eminence through both money and power. That is when they return to cause harm and destruction, and bring a bad name to their religion in the service of those who now rule their minds.

While they achieve their motives through such agency of terror and devastation, the religion itself is buffeted and distorted in revised interpretations that remain patently self-serving. Islam, as a consequence, stands fractured and fragmented, with the Muslim world further receding into isolationist cocoons of bigotry and antiquated revisionism. The world of Islam, thus, is today the least literate, least integrated and probably the most impoverished of the major civilisations of the world. They hardly produce, create or innovate; the free spirit forever straitjacketed in stranglehold antiquity. What does Islam have to say on this? Consider: ‘A perfect Muslim is always in harmony with its surroundings’. And how we violate these kernels of common sense.

More importantly, there is no gain; no political motive, no strategic advantage, no socio-economic gain. It is not that the universities, if there are any left in the world of Islam, can be richer by minds that will be won from Europe, or that internet penetration or even general literacy might improve. Or that the economies of the terror-exporting countries might see gains. There isn’t even a competitive market-gain that can be had by such devastating destruction of the Western capitals that might accrue to the Muslim capitals. What is this war about and what is it on? Only in proving one God better than the other? Forget that there is but only one God for the entire humanity; all religions say that. And yet the war is about gods? Hell has descended in our midst.

How Brussels will change Europe is yet to be seen. It is unfortunate that the Muslims of Europe specifically, and those in the West generally, will be hounded and perhaps slowly evacuated. And Europe itself will be forced to revise its own integration – less travel, less freedom to share and trade, and more isolationism. European culture too will regress and the world will be a poorer place for it. It will impact the global economy, thus hitting the lesser economies of the Muslim world even further.

Closer to home, these bigoted, illiterate interpreters of Islam have, in the name of Islam that they profess to love and in the name of the Prophet (pbuh) whom they claim to revere, enacted excesses that are an outrage to humanity and to any nation that claims to exist in the twenty-first century. What travesty was caused in Lahore with the blood of more than seventy innocents has just no parallel.

It wasn’t the state’s enemy, the TTP, or even Kalbhushan Yadav’s doing, but a patent son of the soil, probably with linkages to Muzzafargarh – as blue as they come – who perpetrated this inhumanity. And those who sat for most of the week at D-Chowk conveying to the entire world the impotence of a nuclear state against these ruffians. What state is this? What people make this state?

Kalbhushan Yadav may have had his task cut out for his equally heinous motives, but there remains no shortage of those from among us who need no Yadav. Unto themselves they are equally venomous and destructive and deathly. There is a need to read other civilizations and introspect how such zealotry can be leashed, and humanity retained.

The writer is a retired air-vice marshal, former ambassador and a security and political analyst.

Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com